SOURCE: “Stumbling Dogtracks on the Sands of Time: Thurber's Less-than-Charming Animals, and Animal Portraits in Earlier American Humor,” in Markham Review, Vol. 10, Spring, 1981, pp. 41–7.

In the following essay, Arnold discusses Thurber's use of animals in his short fiction.

Those critics who have had the temerity to discuss Thurber's animals have often taken the direction chosen by Robert E. Morsberger, in the first book-length study of Thurber. Considering Thurber's animals apart from Fables for Our Time, wherein the humorist uses his own allegorical creatures to turn Aesop's moral lessons on their ears, Morsberger stresses that most of the creatures appear “wholly for their unaffected charm.” Quoting Whitman's verse, “I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contained,” Morsberger opines that Thurber's menagerie appear's primarily to give the author, and his reader, “a diverting though temporary refuge from the confinement of synthetic wall-to-wall living...